Weave med­i­ta­tion and craft to­gether

A COUPLE of plas­tic bags are all peo­ple need to bring to Wild Fi­bres owner Ains­ley Warner’s bas­ketweav­ing work­shops.

They soon learn how to re­use the bags to form the core of a colour­ful wo­ven bas­ket and leave with the skills of the craft that Warner fell in love with when she took her first work­shop three years ago.

“I was com­pletely ad­dicted the sec­ond that we started,” Warner says.

“It’s a journey that you go on and you never know what it’s go­ing to be un­til you fin­ish. Ev­ery­body’s bas­kets look dif­fer­ent.”

Much like the resur­gence of in­ter­est in crafts such as macrame and cro­chet, Warner says the med­i­ta­tive as­pect of bas­ket weav­ing is a big part of its ap­peal.

“In this age where we have all this so­cial me­dia, it’s re­ally beau­ti­ful to be able to cre­ate a plat­form where peo­ple can make things with their hands and sit around with each other and be creative,” she says.

Sus­tain­able nat­u­ral fab­rics are used to make the vi­brant wo­ven bas­kets and ear­rings Warner sells at her Mar­rickville stu­dio and web­site and an im­por­tant fo­cus in her work­shops.

“I use a lot of wool and hemp string and raf­fia, which is a plant-based fab­ric made from leaves and it’s re­ally strong,” she says.

“For the thread you can use rope or net­ting or wool or em­broi­dery thread – any­thing that you can fit inside the head of a nee­dle.”

Warner says pa­tience is the key to get­ting through the tricky start of weav­ing a bas­ket’s base.

“It’s like mak­ing a spi­ral to be­gin with and then you are stitch­ing,” she says.

“The dif­fer­ence then comes from where you place the nee­dle each time.” See more at wild­fi­bres bas­ketry.wix.com/home